Many organizations are structured with a hierarchy that defines various levels of management. At times, the supervisors within the organizations are required to perform company-wide evaluations, reviews, requests, appraisals, or other types of tasks. The information for completing such a task at one level in the hierarchy oftentimes relies on information that must be passed up or the down the hierarchy for a particular supervisor to be able to complete his or her task.
For example, for a compensation review, in which a supervisor reviews the compensation rewards for the employees who are subordinate to the supervisor, the supervisor may be required to perform certain tasks on a periodic basis to ensure that his or her subordinates receive their earned salaries, salary increases, bonuses, etc. The compensation review, for example, may involve evaluating, for each subordinate, the employee's time of service in the company, employee's performance evaluations, overtime hours, and/or other factors. Once the supervisor completes the task of the compensation review, or other type of review, evaluation, etc., the supervisor may be required to submit the results to a higher level supervisor, who may then approve or disapprove the completed review.
If an organization has hundreds or even thousands of supervisors within multiple levels of a hierarchy, it can be difficult to manage the completion of a set of related tasks. However, monitoring the progress of such task sets can be an important aspect of the organization, particular regarding approval of compensation information.